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Friday, July 31, 2015

Cripping the Rainbow: Recoloring Depression Inside Out

"A strange blackness started to creep across the console like a dark, scary blob. 'What is this?' cried Fear. No one knew"

Inside Out: the NovelizationSuzanne Francis

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Driving down the road with my partner and the girls, N. (5 years old) and C. (9 years old), the girls were going back and forth in the back seat about a much discussed topic throughout the summer of 2015: the new Pixar film, Inside Out. "What are your favorite emotions?" I asked the girls. "Anger!" N. replied. "Um, Sadness," C. responded after a moment. As a literary scholar, who thinks a lot about affect, but most importantly as a parent, I probed the girls for their reasons. This seemed to be a great opportunity to glean some insight on what's going on in the girls' respective heads these days while also practicing a form of close reading. "I like Anger because he is really LOUD!" N. responded quickly, mimicking his characteristic sudden shifts in volume. "CONGRATULATIONS, SAN FRANCISCO, YOU RUINED PIZZA!" she continued, repeating one of his memorable lines. "How about you?" I probed C. "Um," she responded, taking her time to think again. "I think Sadness is funny because... like... she keeps saying that things are going to end bad" C. explained. "Like when they are in the long term memories and Sadness tells Joy, 'You are going to get lost in there' and Joy says, 'Think more positively!' 'Okay,' said Sadness, 'I am POSITIVE you are going to get lost'" This was followed by a bout of giggles from both girls and a barrage of repeated lines from the film being played and replayed by both N. and C. for much of the ride home."Interesting," I intimated to my partner while the girls were distracting each other in the back. "At their best, I wouldn't pin either of them as those emotions and at their worst, I would probably reverse those," I speculated. Before I could read much further into the psychology of the girls' responses, my partner shrugged and replied, "Maybe. I think it is more a reflection of the girls' different senses of humor." A sagely response from a mom well attuned to the girls emotions, but also to all that makes them giggle, chortle, and bust a gut. Indeed, this observation explained a lot. At the age of five, nothing made N. squeal with joy more than sudden, surprising, and over the top expressions of emotion. One can always tell when a word, idea, or event catches N.'s fancy, because when one does, she can't get enough to repeating it with sudden bursts of loudness. C's sense of humor is much more muted, often coming in the form of a long story, with a hidden (sometimes cryptic) humor. A big fan of deadpan humor, myself, I've taken to sharing amusing observations with C, who, like her mother, can tell better than most people when I am obscurely making play; a most valuable trait. C. certain expresses a penchant for gross, downcast, even morbid jokes. In this light, Sadness's lethargy and pessimism is a reasonable match for C.'s mode of picking and poking at the world."What about you?" C. asked, crossing conversations. "What are your favorite emotions?" A fair response that might give the girls an equal opportunity to make what they will of our choices as well. "Well," I told them, uncertain how to explain the emotion that spoke most to me. "I would have to say that none of the emotions inside Riley's head were my favorite," I told them referencing the pre-teen main character from the film. Before the girls could think I was giving a non-answer, I continued. "What I mean is that the emotions I liked most were the brief glimpse we got to see inside the Mother's head," I told them. "Remember that? At the dinner table, the film suddenly jumps from Riley to her mom and then to her dad to see what they are thinking." I broke off as the girls started talking about the scene and the jokes that filled it. "What I liked most was how the Mother's emotions all seemed a lot more mellowed, nuanced, and mature. Anger wasn't out of control. Fear wasn't running around flailing. And Sadness was in charge, not Joy like in Riley's head," I said. "I guess that would be my choice. A more experienced, focused, and contemplative sadness." C. clucked a happy reply that I picked the same emotion as her. "The emotions in the parents' heads were more homogenous too," added my partner. "They looked more like the person and like each other. The mom's all wore glasses and the dad's all had mustaches." After all, the main emotions in the film are of a child's intense, inexperienced, and more indeterminate emotions; that can border at times as caricatures or more puritanical versions of themselves as the child is still discovering them and herself. That split the conversation again, as the girls started repeating lines from the emotions of other characters' heads (a dog, a clown, etc.), and my partner and I thought more about how our emotions develop over time and take on personal idiosyncrasies, especially after traumatic and transformative events; that is, if the grayness of depression doesn't shut everything down.

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As a traumatic emotional process, depression can be a positive transformative event in the development of emotional maturity. The key word here is, perhaps, "process." As an allegory, where each emotion is named and embodied, Inside Out presents the all too often assumed sentiment that emotions are a state of being. Sadness is sad. Anger is angry. So too are the people who are said to be disgusted or fearful. They are what they are, as though emotions were locations, categories, or entities that existed in a binary state. The crisis of Inside Out on the surface is the emotional trauma of a young girl moving. The twist and the foundational crisis is the emotional breakdown that happens when one emotion tries to make itself a static state of being rather than a process, a "move" to somewhere else. The choice, as in many narratives, is whether one will stay the same and die (literally or emotionally) or else change and live in a new way. While the physical move from Minnesota to California provides the context, the real drama begins inside Riley's head when Joy forces her hands to keep on the controls and not let the other emotions do their work. Laying in a sleeping bag, in an empty room, in a new house without furniture, memories and with a dead mouse, Joy (and Riley) are still trying to live up the demand (spoken by her mother but implicit throughout the film) to remain happy at all costs. "But think of all the good things that-" Joy begins, arguing for the controls. "No, Joy," Anger interrupted. "There's absolutely no reason for Riley to be happy right now. Let us handle this" (18). Despite being the loud, erratic source of humor that N. so enjoyed, Anger was also a powerful truth teller, which "helped Riley deal with all the injustices of her life" (60-61). Anger speaks the truth and the challenge that Joy and Riley will reject and bring about an emotional shut-down by trying to halt emotional processes and trying to insist on a fantasy that is no longer tenable over the real possibilities for change.The secret hero of Inside Out is Sadness, who has the tools to bring Riley through the difficulties of moving and growing. Early on, the increased role Sadness will play as an archon and leader of Riley's emotions is forecast when the memories dominated by Joy begin to call to Sadness and turn blue. "Sadness!" Joy scolds. "You nearly touched a core memory." "Sorry," Sadness said. "Something is wrong with me. I feel like I'm having a breakdown." "You are not having a breakdown," insists Joy. "It's stress" (15). Of course, Sadness in this moment is reflective of the undoing of Riley's understanding of the world and her emotional processes. She is breaking down where she was, how she was, and who she was in order to make room for where she is going. Sadness would have proceeded to do her work if not for Joy stopping the emotional shift and denying it is happening. Indeed, Joy is also going through a personal breakdown of her own, especially a breakdown in control. Her need to dominate causes her to begin to tear apart and reorder the Headquarter's Control Console while the other emotions and Riley are asleep in order to prevent unhappy thoughts and dreams from doing their work (21). By not allowing Riley's mind to proceed through its prepared processes for a breakdown, through Sadness, Joy is breaking down the whole system of operations in her attempt to keep things the same. Joy's tyrannical fight against change and growth escalates when the overwhelming power of tears and Sadness marks Riley's first day at school causing a new Core Emotion to be generated. This is the first "blue" (or sad) core emotion and will begin powering a new characteristic of Riley's personality; supposedly a part to deal with loss and change. Denying the external and internal shifts, Joy pries open the Core Memory holder, grabs the new blue ball, and initiates a Memory Dump. Sadness tries to fight Joy for control. "As the two struggled for the bright blue sphere, they bumped into the core memory holder and all the core memories fell out!" narrates Francis. "Fear, Anger, and Disgust screamed as all the islands of personality went dark" (31). As the core memories, Sadness (the soon to be hero) and Joy (now revealed as the antagonist), are sucked away to be destroyed. Meanwhile, the whole system begins the process of going grey, dark, and shutting down all emotions. The demands of Joy, not Sadness, lead to depression.The rest of the film may be described as either rising or descending action, brought on by the spiraling of Riley into depression which causes the emotions left to her (Fear, Disgust, and Anger) to further lose control, while Joy and Sadness wander aimlessly trying to get back to Headquarters as well as avoid fading away into oblivion. The inability to move through Sadness, the loss of memories due to the demand that Riley only think happy thoughts, and the rejection of breaking down, changing, and growing is embodied by the formerly rainbow colored control panel slowly growing dark and grey. "The whole console started to shut down," narrates Francis. "A strange blackness slowly crept across the console, like a dark scary blob. 'What is this?' cried Fear. No one knew" (109). The darkness suggests the unknowingness of the emotions experiencing Riley's depression. Not only is this a new event, but depression is represented not as an emotion or a breakdown of emotions but as an absence, a locking out, an static resistance to emotion. Emotions have color, I wrote in a previous piece. Depression is grey. Science tells us that in the "real" world, the world of physics and light, there is only gradation in brightness and wavelength. This is the bare existence that depression promises to see clearly. Yet for most sighted persons, this light is translated through the network of eyes and mind into color. The body transforms light and makes color of out it. Something new, nuanced, and personal comes from the greyscale of the world. The aesthetics of color are emotional because they are intimately us. This spiral of depression cutting off a person from their own abilities and transformation is fought by embracing the often discarded parts of our experiences. It is not until Sadness is allowed to return that the memories are seen in a new light. The past is not as perfectly happy as had been held. Sadness shows Riley that she has went through breakdowns, traumas, and changes in the past and can do so again. Only once the mind, Joy, and the ego lets go to the unknown, does color return in more subtle shades, and the world begins to be known in new ways.

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Inside Out is an excellent text for examining the allegory as a preparation for medieval studies, Biblical exegesis, or any discussion that tends to use Disability as a metaphorical cultural sign. A significant challenge that allegory poses for the modern reader is what characters can or do represent. This is compounded by issues in reading a narrative for context and not merely for characters, otherwise one may overdetermine the meaning or significance of a figure because of their name. In Inside Out, Sadness and Depression are too often conflated, oversimplifying the character, story and emotion. "Sadness was Riley’s demon," writes Chelsea Mize. "Mark my words, anyone who has struggled with depression or other mental health issues will immediately relate to Sadness’ reluctant but ironclad hold on Riley’s brain" (Mize, Bustle.com 2015). This conflation of depression and sadness is repeated by Rachel Simon, another writer at Bustle of the same site (Simon, Bustle.com 2015), or Toni from Reclaiming Your Future (Toni 2015). At the same time, Mize, like Simon, casts doubt on whether the story is really about depression. For Mize, depression and sadness are locatable within a single persona not in the context or story. This reduction is instrumental, as it sets up Mize to discuss the demon that marks her as existing in an aberrant state. "What if it’s Fear that takes over and runs your emotional headquarters, his tyrannical reign leaving you a quivering shell of a person?" Mize asks. "Then you are probably like me... When I was in my first year of grad school, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder" (Mize, Bustle.com 2015). By overdetermining an emotion or pathology's ability to be totally embodied by an allegorical figure, a cursory reading of Inside Out's allegory can reinforce society's demarkation and isolation of those it views as mentally ill or mentally disabled.A crip mode of reading relocates and rereads disability from the person into the social environment; a practice that can be extremely helpful in rediscovering the nuances of an allegory such as Inside Out. Referencing an Saturday Night Live short video satirizing the film, Britt Hayes calls out the class privileges written into the film that suggest a disabling logic that white bourgeois America instills in society in order to spur workers towards impossible goals of wealth and happiness. "Basically, Riley is suffering from an acute case of First World Problems," writes Hates (Hayes, Screen Crush 2015). Close reading the context and narrative structures that give further dynamic meaning to the characters, SNL and Hayes note that unattainable ideals propel the professional and emotional work of the film. The father is chasing a job that promises to bring him one step closer to success if he is willing to leave behind home and family to attend to financial investors. The mother is chasing a home and furnishings in the financially superior real estate of San Francisco rather than small town Minnesota. Yet this ideology was working on the Anderson family well before the move and the supposed start of Riley's breakdown, as Libby Hill attests in "I couldn’t be their “happy girl”: Pixar’s “Inside Out,” childhood depression and the emotional stranglehold of “Minnesota nice” When appearing pleasant at any cost is a defining cultural value, admitting you're unhappy is the biggest struggle" (Hill, Salon 2015). In the Salon article, Hill discovers the same narrative engines of impossible happiness at work in Inside Out in middle class midwest culture. By attending to the allegorical narrative for meaning rather than overemphasizing the names of characters, Hayes and Hill both suggest that it is Joy that is the antagonist and cause of Riley's depression, not Sadness.

By widening the frame for possible meanings in allegory, Inside Out moves from a text that reinforces disability into an engine for cripping the mechanisms of classism and an impossible capitalist promise of lasting ontological happiness. Indeed, the allegory works so well as to propel even those who vilify Sadness to end up in a less pre-determined, pathology. "[Riley] realizes [sic] that acknowledging sadness doesn’t make it stronger and that it doesn’t always need to be fixed but rather, it needs to be acknowledged and comforted so that the person can feel better themselves and not just because someone told them to feel better," writes Toni (Toni, Reclaiming Your Future 2015). "Inside Out teaches us to embrace sadness, not repress it; to let Sadness take the center stage rather than trying to push her to the side or put her in a space where you don’t have to deal with her. Sometimes the best way through the sadness is to dive right into it, the movie says, and once you allow yourself to accept those emotions, things might start to look up" adds Mize (Mize, Bustle.com 2015). Allegory can be reductive, as well as its readers, so it can be especially useful and effective for a narrative such as Inside Out to anticipate those who would want to see disability and mental illness embodied in a singular figure rather than a semi-visible social system. For them, Sadness (like disability) is an unfortunate reality that nonetheless can do some good if society is willing to suffer it and follow the stories it might tell. This is only a beginning, but sets readers off towards more complicated understandings of emotion, depression, and disability as social practices and processes that we move through and which may change even as we are changed by them. This brings us back to the conversation with the girls in the car. If we resist the predetermined meanings of people and feelings, how might we all evolve and grow? In this light, what might a mature Fear look like? Perhaps, he is a planner, an inventor, an investigator, an adrenaline junky, or a brave adventurer. What might mature Sadness offer? The list may include the power of mourning, empathy, tranquility, and perseverance. How about seasoned Anger? The idea of justice, discernment, drive, and even hope all come to mind. In each of these cases, depression can be used as a pivotal process in complicating and deepening each of these emotions.